Will people pay for the New York Times online?

“The Wall Street Journal has a paywall, so we can too!” (Financial information is one of the few kinds of information whose recipients don’t want to share.)

It is true that The Wall Street Journal is one of two newspapers (along with the Financial Times) that seems to have been pretty successful getting people to pay. It’s not clear why Shirky thinks people don’t want to share financial information. Hopefully he doesn’t think business people want to keep the Journal to themselves to keep some competitive advantage. Pretty much everyone in finance and business that I know reads the Journal every day – no one would seriously consider anything in there a competitive advantage. People send Journal links to each other all the time. It is background knowledge that everyone is expected to know.

The reason people are willing to pay for the Journal has nothing to do with their unwillingness to share or pirate financial information. It’s quite simply the fact that the Journal is a valuable business input that can’t be found anywhere else. Most people, when presented with something of value that is scarce and reasonably priced, don’t pirate (especially when they can charge it to their business). The revenue-maximizing price of any good – including digital goods – is determined by value and scarcity, not what it costs to produce it.

The fact that the cost of distributing newspapers is dropping to near zero only affects the price of newspapers if the content is commoditized. The problem the New York Times has isn’t that people are willing to share or pirate their content. It’s that with the advent of the internet, competition for general news went from one or two per market to thousands per market. (The other big blow was classifieds getting decoupled from newspapers).

Most business people I know consider the Times an essential daily read, not just for its business and finance news, but also its section A news and op-eds. If you are a running an operating company or investment firm you want to know not just narrow business news but the broader context of what’s happening in the world.

Most smaller newspapers will go out of business over the next few years, vastly increasing the scarcity of news. If the Times creates content that is scare and valuable – and remains an essential “business input” – it can have the same success online as the Journal.

4 thoughts on “Will people pay for the New York Times online?”

I was curious if you ever thought of changing the page layout of your blog?
Its very well written; I love what youve got to say.
But maybe you could a little more in the way of content so
people could connect with it better. Youve got an awful lot
of text for only having one or 2 images. Maybe you could
space it out better?